It genuinely disgusts me that the world's largest media company shoves addictive, short form content down users throats (especially young people). Anyone working on it at Google should be ashamed of what they're doing.
If you watch Shorts, maybe. If you watch normal videos, the comments are pretty much an afterthought.
But even shorts, assuming they're like reels/stories, the "social" aspect is very minimal compared with, say, Facebook posts back in the day, where your friends would see and comment and reply to each other.
The Algorithm doesn't really want that anymore; it wants to feed you content from arbitrary people to keep you passively engaged, not to foster conversation/active engagement.
you know what... besides everything, good for them.
I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation.
Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that supports them financially, well good for them. I still remember the 2018 fiasco when the Ads bubble burst because of the bridge incident, and lots of them didn't know what to do cause the revenue was very shit for years and the future looked bleak.
My favorite channels thread:
- Watch Wes Work: Car Mechanic but super funny
- Super EyePatch Wolf and Worm Girl: Niche Horror Video Games and Topics.
- Lots of Japanese Drawing Channels
- Devaslife: Japanese Developer and Creator of Inkdrop
- Miziziziz and countless game developers that want to show their games and tutorials.
- Acerola: Best Youtube Content on Graphics Development
- jdh: game development in C and super amazing content truly
- Ethoslab: He'll always have a spot on my youtube world
> MoffettNathanson runs the numbers and comes to the conclusion that YouTube’s estimated $62 billion in 2025 will have allowed it to pass The Walt Disney Co.’s media business, which generated $60.9 billion last year (excluding Disney’s lucrative experiences division).
Just for reference in 2025 annual year, the experiences division generated just a casual $36 billion with a pretty high profit margin.
This really doesn't seem like an apples to apple comparision. Youtube is nothing like Disney fundamentally
I wish the audio quality of youtube videos matched other streaming services. Bandwidth-wise it's pretty minimal, but the audio quality isn't quite as good as competitors like Spotify (and the longer they take to upgrade audio bitrate, the longer the problem persists and uploaded content has lower audio fidelity)
An accessible interface to YouTube content without tracking, using a decentralized network of community-run instances that scrape, rather than API-call, site data.
Invidious is great. I quit visiting reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube in favor of frontends and libredirect. Has greatly improved my life because I use these platforms less, but also the peace of mind. Invidious seems to be the least reliable of the bunch of frontends, which makes sense because it is the most bandwith.
At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious.
Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly?
I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently.
photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.
After hopping between several in the past, I've learned to avoid services that blatantly violate TOS for their existence, since they rarely last long, usually going private once the cease and desist letters start coming.
I ended up just going with the non-music youtube premium "lite" for $8/month.
Invidious' docs recommend restarting the service regularly[1]. I can only imagine that this means there is a serious memory leak somewhere. I notice the hardware requirements specifically note: '2GB of free RAM, as long as it is restarted regularly'
My biggest concern about Youtube is that they do not truly have a competitor. They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.
The barrier to entry seems pretty low, technically at least. Maybe someone will create something with a different twist that will catch on. TikTok was able to carve out a niche after all.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised. In many ways, YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment.
The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc.
So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with.
Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it.
Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't.
The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.
What is shocking about youtube's advertising is just how bad the supposedly "targeted" aspect of it is.
The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way.
Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media!
The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.
> remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install
Which is it? Does YouTube respect your time and attention as a user or does it prey on them? I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
The fact that you can pay to opt out of ads has always seemed like a weird business decision to me. Sabotage your ad viewership by siphoning off users with spending money for things like an ad-free subscription. I suppose it prevents losing users to paid platforms or those who just wouldn't tolerate ads at all, and gives an out for users who would otherwise contribute to the ads vs ad blockers arms race.
Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike), channels that I would never watch being presented... I should have noted the exact date, but I didn't. I guess it was around two years ago.
Even searching for specific topics is hard. I just know there's enough material on the platform, but in my search results I get so many doubles and channels that I already know. I can keep scrolling, but to no result.
If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.
At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.
I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.
I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.
Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.
Agreed. It painfully overfits based on what I've watched. I've watched thousands of videos and it still doesn't understand me at all because it appears to treat every action as equal. As an example, I like watching the Starcraft II streamer uThermal but I'm not really interested in other Starcraft II content creators because uThermal scratches that itch. However YouTube will keep showing me Starcraft II content creators that I am not subbed to and whose content I will never watch.
Of the 30 videos currently proposed to be on front page I'd consider watching maybe 4 of them. To be honest I'm a big fan of the change they made to occasionally show new content because it actually provides some novelty (one of those 4 is of a video from a creator with only 19 subscribers).
I noticed that the Shorts pedaling is causing a major deterioration of the service and it started a few years ago.
At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certainly has the scent of enshitification since Shorts.
It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.
* General DIY/inventions: DIY Perks, Uri Tuchman, Stuff Made Here, Colin Furze, Applied Science, Breaking Taps
I think it's actually not too bad at surfacing this stuff. They also have a "New to You" button you can click.
My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
The recommended videos next to the current video and generally awful now. But my YouTube usage almost exclusively starts on the first row of videos they show when I'm logged in. They're almost entirely recent uploads from the channels I subscribe to and what most often. I subscribe to too many channels to keep up on the full feed of uploaded, but YouTube seems to do a good job highlighting the subscriptions I'm most interested in.
Admittedly, I rarely "browse" YouTube looking for new things. I typically find new channels either from other sources (reddit, Twitter, etc.) or because one channel mentions another channel.
> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
Either I'm doing something very right, or everyone else is doing something very wrong, because my front page of YouTube is fine.
Most of my front page is videos about games I play or have played (Factorio, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Cities: Skylines, and more), dash cam compilations (Which I watch a lot of), and various videos from channels I'm subscribed to such as Kurzgesagt, Chubbyemu, ElectroBOOM, LockPickingLawyer, Engineering Explained, Veritasium (Just discovered Newcomb's Problem and I'm a solid one-boxer) and more.
I never see Mr Beast or any of the other channels people complain about recommended to me. Every recommendation is relevant. YouTube knows me well.
Somehow, it just seems some people use YouTube in such a way that YouTube can't figure out what you like, and so you just get a default recommendation.
> all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike)
What is with the thumbnails?!? I mean, I know what's with them- content makers have found a technique that works, and are beating that dead horse until it stops coughing up money. [1]
I guess my question is- what is with the median Youtube viewer? Are they just completely governed by their id? Does it not register that they're falling for the same bait every single time? That would bother me, but if people realize they're being manipulated and are fine with it, I guess that makes me the old man yelling at clouds. Oh well, I've been called worse.
my personal recommendation is to browse from new personality (aka, log out and clean cookies or privite session I guess)
you'd be surprised both how different recommendations can be, and how fast algorithm recognizes that it is you and starts giving all the same stuff again
but still, that's the best way of discovering new things that I've found
I stopped having that issue when I was subscribed to the pages I enjoyed watching and watched that content. Without that its just going to throw you random popular content.
I think the lesson for other media companies is to get all their content into a single online "property" or are their anti-trust issues involved?
There's a very low bar for anyone in the world to watch YouTube with a handheld device and an internet connection. What am I missing?
I suppose it's their ad program and fast-acting content ID system that juice it - that'd be the hard part to get right.
X has a lot of video content too - why not present it better in a video-focused version? Get rid of the "X" branding though - it's not a rating. Maybe "Y"?
Micropayments should be tied into all compensation now. x402 as well for monetization.
Perhaps if Soundcloud did video it'd be a challenger and there's one area Soundcloud lacks but should be able to capitalize on - music videos as uploaded by artists themselves.
When will Youtube
- Block "unverified" browsers?
- Force KYC or Youtube premium to watch videos?
In their ongoing fight against yt-dlp and others i can already not watch videos using VPNs.
Adblockers has made most tech people unaware of the enshittification of most web services. For most normal people when they eventually make this change it will not affect them at all.
Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily.
I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT. The few things that they do put up are often so mind expanding whether it's Berty Russel, The Beatles, or some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.
Mandatory PSA for Android users because people tend to have similar complaints each time in popular threads: ReVanced allows you to have YouTube with Sponsorblock, background play, no ads, Shorts completely hidden, (estimated) dislike counter brought back etc.
Couldn't imagine using YouTube on my phone without it, it's night and day difference – that's despite being a premium subscriber anyway.
Love it or hate, it is better than what traditional broadcast television has become. Cannot even watch a TV channel on the television nowadays. It is all just advertisements, sometimes stretching past 5 minutes. Even with youtube advertising more, it is not as painful as watching any kind of show or movie on a television.
72 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] threadBut even shorts, assuming they're like reels/stories, the "social" aspect is very minimal compared with, say, Facebook posts back in the day, where your friends would see and comment and reply to each other.
The Algorithm doesn't really want that anymore; it wants to feed you content from arbitrary people to keep you passively engaged, not to foster conversation/active engagement.
I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation.
Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that supports them financially, well good for them. I still remember the 2018 fiasco when the Ads bubble burst because of the bridge incident, and lots of them didn't know what to do cause the revenue was very shit for years and the future looked bleak.
My favorite channels thread: - Watch Wes Work: Car Mechanic but super funny - Super EyePatch Wolf and Worm Girl: Niche Horror Video Games and Topics. - Lots of Japanese Drawing Channels - Devaslife: Japanese Developer and Creator of Inkdrop - Miziziziz and countless game developers that want to show their games and tutorials. - Acerola: Best Youtube Content on Graphics Development - jdh: game development in C and super amazing content truly - Ethoslab: He'll always have a spot on my youtube world
Just for reference in 2025 annual year, the experiences division generated just a casual $36 billion with a pretty high profit margin.
This really doesn't seem like an apples to apple comparision. Youtube is nothing like Disney fundamentally
https://invidious.io https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
An accessible interface to YouTube content without tracking, using a decentralized network of community-run instances that scrape, rather than API-call, site data.
[EDIT]
Also Yattee doing the Lord's work:
https://github.com/yattee/yattee
Privacy oriented video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS with Invidious support.
At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious.
Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly?
I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently.
photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.
After hopping between several in the past, I've learned to avoid services that blatantly violate TOS for their existence, since they rarely last long, usually going private once the cease and desist letters start coming.
I ended up just going with the non-music youtube premium "lite" for $8/month.
It has been this way for years. Seems odd.
[1] https://docs.invidious.io/community-installation-guide/#crea...
It's like saying McDonalds doesn't have any competitor.
The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc.
So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with.
Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it.
Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't.
The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.
The “remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install though.
The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way.
Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media!
The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.
> remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install
Which is it? Does YouTube respect your time and attention as a user or does it prey on them? I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
The fact that you can pay to opt out of ads has always seemed like a weird business decision to me. Sabotage your ad viewership by siphoning off users with spending money for things like an ad-free subscription. I suppose it prevents losing users to paid platforms or those who just wouldn't tolerate ads at all, and gives an out for users who would otherwise contribute to the ads vs ad blockers arms race.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike), channels that I would never watch being presented... I should have noted the exact date, but I didn't. I guess it was around two years ago.
Even searching for specific topics is hard. I just know there's enough material on the platform, but in my search results I get so many doubles and channels that I already know. I can keep scrolling, but to no result.
If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.
I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.
I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.
Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.
A woodworker and former RIM engineer -- if you don't already know his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel
Of the 30 videos currently proposed to be on front page I'd consider watching maybe 4 of them. To be honest I'm a big fan of the change they made to occasionally show new content because it actually provides some novelty (one of those 4 is of a video from a creator with only 19 subscribers).
As soon as I see a clickbait thumbnail/title, I ask to not show it anymore.
On a daily basis I get 90% of interesting content on the home page.
It particularly works great for music; now I get better recommendations from YouTube than from Spotify (which is my main music platform).
At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certainly has the scent of enshitification since Shorts.
Check out Peter Millard.
It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.
There are dozens of great channels in those spaces. Here are some I remember just off the top of my head.
* Cars: Watch Wes Work (need 1.5x speed here!), Prop Department, Mat Armstrong, Chris Fix
* Woodworking: Frank Howarth, Matthias Wandel, The Wood Whisperer, John Heisz, Steve Ramsey
* Metalworking: Clickspring, Cronova Engineering, Tubal Cain
* General DIY/inventions: DIY Perks, Uri Tuchman, Stuff Made Here, Colin Furze, Applied Science, Breaking Taps
I think it's actually not too bad at surfacing this stuff. They also have a "New to You" button you can click.
My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
Admittedly, I rarely "browse" YouTube looking for new things. I typically find new channels either from other sources (reddit, Twitter, etc.) or because one channel mentions another channel.
Either I'm doing something very right, or everyone else is doing something very wrong, because my front page of YouTube is fine.
Most of my front page is videos about games I play or have played (Factorio, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Cities: Skylines, and more), dash cam compilations (Which I watch a lot of), and various videos from channels I'm subscribed to such as Kurzgesagt, Chubbyemu, ElectroBOOM, LockPickingLawyer, Engineering Explained, Veritasium (Just discovered Newcomb's Problem and I'm a solid one-boxer) and more.
I never see Mr Beast or any of the other channels people complain about recommended to me. Every recommendation is relevant. YouTube knows me well.
Somehow, it just seems some people use YouTube in such a way that YouTube can't figure out what you like, and so you just get a default recommendation.
What is with the thumbnails?!? I mean, I know what's with them- content makers have found a technique that works, and are beating that dead horse until it stops coughing up money. [1]
I guess my question is- what is with the median Youtube viewer? Are they just completely governed by their id? Does it not register that they're falling for the same bait every single time? That would bother me, but if people realize they're being manipulated and are fine with it, I guess that makes me the old man yelling at clouds. Oh well, I've been called worse.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVGpvzcHko
you'd be surprised both how different recommendations can be, and how fast algorithm recognizes that it is you and starts giving all the same stuff again
but still, that's the best way of discovering new things that I've found
Eg. https://youtu.be/ucRTW4rgrbU?si=dfRIy76BM8ntNQph
And stop recommending me the same videos over and over , gah
There's a very low bar for anyone in the world to watch YouTube with a handheld device and an internet connection. What am I missing?
I suppose it's their ad program and fast-acting content ID system that juice it - that'd be the hard part to get right.
X has a lot of video content too - why not present it better in a video-focused version? Get rid of the "X" branding though - it's not a rating. Maybe "Y"?
Micropayments should be tied into all compensation now. x402 as well for monetization.
Perhaps if Soundcloud did video it'd be a challenger and there's one area Soundcloud lacks but should be able to capitalize on - music videos as uploaded by artists themselves.
In their ongoing fight against yt-dlp and others i can already not watch videos using VPNs.
Adblockers has made most tech people unaware of the enshittification of most web services. For most normal people when they eventually make this change it will not affect them at all.
I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT. The few things that they do put up are often so mind expanding whether it's Berty Russel, The Beatles, or some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.
Photonicinduction
The very best of what youtube can offer, to me. Pick any video.
Couldn't imagine using YouTube on my phone without it, it's night and day difference – that's despite being a premium subscriber anyway.
covered in terms of conference videos,
then you can listen to dj mixes.
YouTube is simply goated - no other platform comes to the versatility you can consume in terms of long-form content.